After deliberating for well over seven months, the Union government has eventually evolved a scheme to extend the scope of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) on individual land holdings with Rs. 1.5 lakh as the upper limit of expenditure. The Rural Development Ministry has prepared a draft guideline, detailing not only the works that could be taken up for implementation but also the conditions to govern the...

The government needs to allocate more funds for public health. The mismatch between the declared objective of universal healthcare through the public health system and the actual level of expenditure remains serious.  One of the three most important planks on which Barak Obama won the U.S. presidential election was the country’s healthcare system, which he promised to fix. Indeed, the most important legislative measure initiated by Mr. Obama so far...

Of Indian households’ total annual income, 0.22 per cent is spent on buying newspapers — that is, if total national household annual income was Rs 100, 22 paise would be set aside for newspapers. Paying off bank loans (expenditure under equated monthly instalments) takes up 1.4 per cent of total household annual income. The share of health expenditure is 1.5 per cent, and that of education expenditure, 3.21 per cent....

The Tendulkar Committee has pitched for a policy position that is stranded between the harsh realities of poverty and a fiscally conservative neo-liberal framework.  The debate on the extent of poverty in India has been a matter of global interest in the recent years. The primary reason for the global interest in the debate is that the levels of poverty in India and China have come to exert significant influence...

Poverty is a multi-dimensional concept. Official statistics in India have always referred, arguably narrowly, to only income poverty (using the proxy measure of consumption expenditure from the NSSO surveys).The Suresh Tendulkar Committee report submitted to the Planning Commission is the latest input to the “Great Indian Poverty Debate”. While the increase in the number of poor households, as suggested by the Tendulkar Committee, may indeed help expand the coverage of...